The disclosed embodiments of the present invention relate to performing a refresh operation upon a volatile memory, and more particularly, to a refresh method for referring to at least one parameter of a volatile memory to switch between different refresh types and related memory controller.
Memory refresh is an information maintenance technique required by a volatile memory such as a dynamic random access memory (DRAM). In a DRAM chip, the logic value of each bit is stored by the presence or absence of electric charges on a small capacitor which acts as a memory cell. The electric charges in the memory cells would leak away as time passes. Hence, the stored data would eventually be lost if there is no memory refresh. In general, the memory refresh is to read information from the volatile memory and immediately rewrite the read information into the volatile memory without modification. In this way, the information in the volatile memory can be preserved correctly.
The refresh operation and the read/write operation cannot be performed on the same storage area in the volatile memory. As a result, there is a tradeoff between the memory refresh efficiency and the data access performance. Thus, there is a need for an innovative memory refresh design which is capable of adaptively switching between different refresh types to make the volatile memory have better memory refresh efficiency under one refresh type and have better data access performance under another refresh type.